Marin Alsop makes a welcome return following her triumph at last year’s Last Night, to conduct the BBC Symphony Orchestra in Mahler’s First Symphony. Originally designated a ‘symphonic poem’, the work retains all the programmatic colour this suggests. A young hero travels through life, marvelling at nature and growing to maturity, but encountering the sorrows and conflicts of Fate at every turn.
Mahler’s long-limbed lyricism meets its match in the muscular drive of John Adams’s Saxophone Concerto, written for virtuoso soloist Timothy McAllister, and his iconic orchestral miniature Short Ride in a Fast Machine, which pulses with anarchic life.
